Hands-on with Firefox 29: More “customizable,” more Chrome-y

Release features new toolbar layout, updated version of Firefox Sync.

Today, The Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 29.0, the first full release of the browser based on the new Australis “user experience.” Featuring a new toolbar layout, an updated version of the Firefox Sync cloud synchronization service, and a host of other incremental adjustments, the latest Firefox feels a lot different—though to people who have used Google’s Chrome, it may look strangely familiar.

Users of Firefox’s Nightly beta build first got a look at the new interface last November when it was released as part of the early build of Firefox 28. Australis is focused on making the browser's toolbar interface as customizable as possible, allowing users to show as much or as little “chrome” as they want above the displayed page. It takes several visual cues from the design of Chrome, (or to be more accurate, it took them back from Chrome, which borrowed from the early Australis implementations) including the “hamburger” menu button in the browser’s menu pane, but it implements the features behind those design elements in a way that's unique to Firefox.

Starting from the very top, the first thing most veteran Firefox users will notice is the change in the shape of the tabs—they’re no longer squared off. They now sport rounded edges and curve, file folder-like, into the frame of the displayed webpage. Unhighlighted tabs are displayed without a “top,” appearing just as blocks of text separated by fading vertical lines.

Out with the old, boxy look...

Out with the old, boxy look...

And in with the new, rounder, friendlier one.

There are even more cosmetic changes in what Mozilla refers to as the “Awesome Bar”—the merged navigation and toolbar. You can populate the tool pane to the right of the address bar with the features you use most and leave others in the pop-up menu box exposed by clicking on the three-bar “hamburger” icon.

One of the features in that collection is the Firefox Sync service. Sync has been updated for Firefox 29—instead of using a set of activation codes to connect the Firefox browsers on your tablet and smartphone to the bookmark and setting synchronization service, Sync now lets you log in with a Firefox account associated with an email address. You can now also sync browsers running on separate computers so that history and bookmarks follow you from one PC to another.

Enlarge/ The Firefox 27 startup tour introduces the new "intuitive menu," launched from the three-bar hamburger icon. Almost everything in it is open to customization.

By clicking the “customize” button in the menu box, you can now tweak what shows up in the toolbar and hide or show the browser’s title bar, bookmarks bar, and (on Windows and Linux) the pull-down menus bar. You can also add or remove features from the menu box and address bar—including yanking the now extraneous Google search box.

Enlarge/ Drag, drop, hide or show—the customization screen of Firefox 29 lets you put what you use most in the toolbar and get the rest out of the way.

There are a few pieces of Firefox 29 that may take a little bit of digging by users to take advantage of. One of those is the new social sharing feature of the Firefox SocialAPI. When it was introduced last year, SocialAPI made it possible to run services like Facebook Messenger and news feeds such as Cliqz in a browser sidebar. With the latest Firefox release, that functionality has been extended to one-click social sharing for Facebook and the del.icio.us social tagging site, among others, driven by integrated web services.

Enlarge/ Eight of the SocialAPI-based services that can now be integrated into Firefox.

Enlarge/ Click on the "activate now" link on Firefox's SocialAPI page for Facebook, and Firefox prompts you to enable the link-sharing service. It can then be launched from a paper airplane icon on the toolbar or in the menu.

The problem is that these services aren’t yet directly exposed as options through Firefox’s menus or its “add-ons” directory. Currently, they’re published on a webpage that allows you to subscribe to the services, and some of the services (such as Del.icio.us) provide links to the service streams from their own sites.

Update: Some readers have noted that Firefox 29 is in many ways less customizable because of the way it's shaved away parts in the interest of a simpler interface. The add-on bar, for example, is gone. But that's because the add-on bar is now part of the tool pane. Other features, such as putting the tabs on the bottom, can be restored by using the Classic Theme Restorer Add-On.

Sean Gallagher / Sean is Ars Technica's IT Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.